I am concerned that legislation is being drafted for "improving monitoring
arrangements for children educated at home;" no doubt as a result of the
Badman Review. I have been told in an email by a DCSF representative that
the need for monitoring this is a safety issue; the implication is that this is
not primarily an education issue (education could be monitored without home
visits or private interviewing of children).

The moment the government feels it has the responsibility to monitor the safety
of all individual children in their homes, we have entered a police
state. Children are born to their parents and have always been primarily
their parents' responsibility (even for education purposes), and government bodies
should not be intervening in the homes of Englishmen unless they are presented
with evidence that criminal harm is likely to be happening in specific
individual homes (rather than those of a class of people). The idea that
a group of people (homeschoolers) may be abusers because a handful are, is no
different to saying that Bengalis may be abusers because a handful are.
The government would not dare to inspect the homes of, say, Somali under-5s,
just because a rumour had been started that there is a danger of abuse in those
homes, even if the evidence suggested a slightly higher level of abusers than
the rest of under-5s. In fact we understand that the level of children
requiring a child-protection plan under Elective Home Education is lower than
in the school population, but even if it were slightly higher, individual
monitoring would go against the principle of "innocent until proved
guilty" which is one of the most important in English law. It would
only be if a genuinely high level of abuse cases were being legally proved that
it might be necessary to monitor all such families. As a general
principle, the government has no mandate in Englsh law to go looking for crime
in individual homes where it has no reason to believe it exists.

Given the lack of evidence I feel it is wholly inappropriate that legislation
is being drafted in advance of the Select Committee inquiry
.
September 2009